By: Becky Harris
Today’s travelers are seeking more comprehensive and streamlined services so they can discover destinations, book their itinerary, and start exploring as soon as they arrive — all in one place. In response, companies are adding more robust maps and location services to their offerings.
Just in time for PhocusWright Europe, we’re sharing our top three best practices from customers like Lonely Planet, Fliggy, Hotels.com, The Weather Channel, and Snapchat. They’re using our building blocks to add fast, reliable maps, search, and navigation natively into their apps.
1. Make recommendations based on real-time info
Show travelers what’s happening around the world in real-time to help them book a less crowded travel destination, or find the most popular spots in a city once they’ve arrived. Our heatmaps layer (available for both web and mobile) allows you to display real-time trends in a map style.
You can also help travelers maximize their time in a city by providing time maps (using our isochrones plugin) to show what destinations are accessible within a specified travel time or distance. Then, use our Navigation SDK to help them reach their desired spot.
2. Provide a great user experience for easy, engaging exploration
Use Mapbox Studio to customize every aspect of your map to meet the needs of your users. Choose the size of place labels, decide how each detail displays at different zoom levels, and add interactive features like dynamic popups, custom markers, and animations. You can even let users change the map text from their default language to the local language when they need to ask for directions!
If you want to push your UI one step further, use Mapbox AR to view your content in the context of the real world, instead of simply displaying a business’s details in a tile on a map. With AR, if your users are walking near a cafe you can show them something like this:
3. Ensure maps are reliable everywhere in the world and even offline
Support your users everywhere in the world, online and off. With travel to and from China on the rise, we built Mapbox.cn to address the typical lag-time experienced across the “Great Firewall.” By handling network requests at local data centers in China, we can render maps 10 times faster than other providers.
You can also ensure travelers have the map info they need even in areas with poor connectivity or no network connection at all. Strip out unnecessary features from our SDKs to build for smaller phone screen and storage sizes. And use our offline maps to pre-cache data and styles, so your users can download maps without worrying about spotty coverage or roaming charges — you can cache an area the size of Greater London.
Let’s talk
Meet us at Phocuswright or learn more about using our tools to create custom travel experiences.
Not headed to PhocusWright? Join us at Locate, May 30–31 in San Francisco, where we’ll bring together speakers from National Geographic, Lonely Planet and more to dive deeper into how their companies are using maps and location data for travel.
Becky Chappell - Product Marketing Manager - Mapbox | LinkedIn
Top 3 ways to engage and retain travel users was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.